Happy Labor Day!
For most of us — a new academic year is now well underway.
For some of us — it’s just about to begin.
Either way — I hope that this extended weekend serves as a great chance for you to refuel and recharge as we prepare to push on into a fall of ministry with college students.
Below are the Top 10 most viewed posts from the month of August!
How do you deal with your own limitations?
How do you struggle with the notion that you are called to be “all things, to all people?”
How do you live in the tension of wanting to be measured, peaceful, and sane — when expectations (both internal and external) seem to dictate that you do more, be more, and give more?
I think one of the challenges of being a good leader in our noisy culture is the ability to sense what we are called to do and be — and then focus primarily (if not solely) on those things.
You may have caught my post last week, reflecting on 15 Things I’ve Learned from 15 Years of College Ministry. If not, you should check it out!
Those 15 years have unfolded on four different campuses — but the last seven have been in the same place. And truth be told, I’m surprised that I’ve made it this long.
It’s not that I’m a bad employee — often at risk of getting fired. Nor is it that I dislike the place I work (or that I’ve previously worked) — all have been great! It has more to do with me — and my propensity for change.
In the past, I’ve enjoyed starting on a new campus, making new relationships, assessing what’s working — and what’s not, and then discerning how God wanted to use me in that place.
They’re here, but are we ready for them?
And what I mean by “ready” is — have we sufficiently done our homework in order to know who, exactly, the students that make up the Class of 2016 are?
If your answer to that question is “no,” — know that you’re not alone.
And thankfully there’s a resource that can help to quickly get us up to speed on this year’s incoming class of college students.
It’s known as The Mindset List and is put out yearly by Beloit College.
Yesterday was our day of campus-wide leadership training.
It’s a time when we bring together all of the students leaders of varying student groups across campus for some shared training and team building.
For the day, we set aside the planning and preparation for our specific areas to recognize that we — as leaders — are not alone on campus. There are others who aspire to similar heights, and face many of the same challenges that we do.
From year to year it’s never quite the same — and I think this year might have been one of our best efforts!
Personally, I had the chance to co-present to our student leadership population of 350+ about the lies many leaders believe. Many of these lies were identified by different student leaders who have seen them — in some shape or fashion — played on within the student leadership culture on our campus.
Strong ministry leadership is foundational to success.
Informed, well-trained, and intentionally supported student leadership is essential to magnifying the power of, and exponentially expanding the reach of, your ministry on campus.
Student leadership isn’t just important for your ministry, but it’s an incredible opportunity for students to develop their gifts, explore their passions, and serve Christ in their campus community.
But good student leaders, and good student leadership, don’t just happen.
The beginning of the school year — it’s one of our busiest times of the year.
So many students to meet, so many to reconnect with.
It’s a season in which life seems to move at an incredibly pace — nearly impossible to keep up with — or so it would seem.
Yet I was recently reminded that while this might be true for many of us, it isn’t true for everyone.
I’ve got a friend I’ve been visiting in the hospital the past few weeks. In my visits with him I’ve been reminded that time moves slower there. Much slower.
A College Student, A Homeless Man, And A Rabbi Walk Into A Coffee Shop.
That may sound like the opening line of a bad joke, but it actually describes an experiment I started last semester at the University of Delaware.
A couple volunteers and I were discussing the example we have in Jesus and his disciples, who were intentional about sharing their faith with friends “friendship evangelism” and with strangers “initiative evangelism”. When we scrolled through our phone contacts to count how many friends we actually had who weren’t Christians, we realized something had to change.
About 925,000 people go to bed hungry every night. Food insecurity plagues one in seven people on the planet. Around 25,000 people die every twenty-four hours from hunger or hunger related disease – more than those who succumb to malaria, TB and AIDS combined. Most of them are children – ten children die every minute.
What makes these statistics not only staggering but sinful are these two additional facts. There is enough food produced for each person on the planet to consume 4.3 pounds of food per day – that’s equivalent to seventeen quarter pounders. Even college students don’t eat that much food! And this: nearly 3 trillion pounds of food goes to waste every year.
Right about now collegiate leaders all around the country are having a severe dose of reality. Pure pandemonium is about to commence because we’ve realized that in just over four short weeks we’ve got students arriving back on campus and our Fall Semesters will be in full swing.
Dang that was a short summer!
All of our well thought out plans and strategies are about to be tested with a vengeance. We’re hoping our student leadership teams are prepared and have brought their A-Games. And we ourselves are screaming like banshees praying like mad that we haven’t forgotten anything because before we realize it we’re going to have incoming freshman crawling out of the woodwork all over our campus.